Home Assistant Just Swallowed Its App Store and Renamed Its Cloud

For a piece of software that is famous for running entirely in your house, Home Assistant is having a very big week in public. In early October, the open-source smart home platform made two announcements that reshape how millions of self-hosters extend and connect their setups. First, the community's unofficial app store, HACS, is being folded into Home Assistant Core as a built-in integration called Marketplace, expected with the November 2026.11 release. Second, the optional subscription Home Assistant Cloud is being renamed Home Assistant Link, with the change planned for the December release.

Neither move changes what Home Assistant is: software you run locally on hardware you control. But both signal where the platform thinks the next wave of self-hosted smart homes is heading. Fewer hoops to jump through, less confusion about what the word cloud means, and a clearer line between the stuff that is officially supported and the stuff the community builds.

HACS comes home

HACS, the Home Assistant Community Store, has been the platform's open secret for years. It started as a side project and became the de facto way to install integrations, themes, and dashboard cards that Home Assistant does not ship itself. It was always unofficial: you installed HACS by adding custom code, then used it to install other custom code.

The new Marketplace integration is HACS rebuilt as a first-class citizen. Merged into the development branches this month, it is expected with Core 2026.11. Once it lands, installing community integrations will be a core feature, not a hack. You may no longer need to restart Home Assistant after installing updates from the community store, one of those small frictions that annoyed veterans and confused beginners.

Migration is meant to be painless. Existing HACS installations migrate automatically when Home Assistant first starts after the update: custom repositories, update entities, and dashboard resources carry over, while the old HACS integration and its files are removed. existing HACS addresses and project links will keep working. There are caveats, so check the migration docs for the details, but the intent is clear: nothing you built gets stranded.

Making Marketplace a core component does not turn everything in it into officially supported software. Easier installation does not change who fixes the bugs.

What Marketplace does not promise

This is the part that matters most, and Home Assistant is being explicit about it. Making Marketplace a Core component does not turn the projects inside it into officially supported Home Assistant integrations. The projects remain community-created. Home Assistant does not test, audit, or support the content distributed through Marketplace. Users must accept a warning before installing or updating community content, and replacing a built-in integration requires an additional confirmation.

That distinction is the whole story. Marketplace brings the store into Home Assistant while leaving responsibility for individual projects with their maintainers. Easier installation does not change who maintains an integration or resolves problems with it. For device makers, nothing changes about certification either: Work With Home Assistant certification still requires a Core integration unless you build on open standards like Matter, Zigbee, or Z-Wave.

It is a grown-up compromise. Home Assistant is 13 years old with more than 20,000 contributors, and at this scale it cannot bless every community project without slowing to a crawl. The alternative was to leave discovery and installation as a word-of-mouth exercise. Marketplace threads the needle: first-class installation, with honesty about who is behind each package.

The cloud is now called Link

The second announcement is a rename, but the reasoning is worth reading. Home Assistant Cloud, the optional paid subscription run by the commercial arm Nabu Casa, is becoming Home Assistant Link. Same service, same price, new name. The reported pricing stays at $6.50 a month or $65 a year, and the features stay identical: remote access, voice assistant integrations, text-to-speech and speech-to-text, and encrypted off-site backups.

So why rename a service nobody hated? Because the word cloud now carries baggage the project wants no part of. Founder Paulus Schoutsen told The Verge: "We are renaming Home Assistant Cloud to Home Assistant Link, because we hate clouds. Big tech ruined the cloud, so we're out." The official blog makes the same case in its own words: the name created friction, since Schoutsen has spent years on stage telling people not to buy products that require the cloud to function, then had to explain why Home Assistant Cloud was an exception. Worse, some new users assumed the platform itself ran on remote servers. It never did. Home Assistant has always run locally, in the home.

The rename also lands with a comparison the project wants you to remember. Link is optional: your lights, locks, and sensors keep working if the subscription lapses. There is no lock-in and no data harvesting. Nabu Casa says the majority of subscription profits go to the Open Home Foundation, the nonprofit behind the project. It has also migrated its servers to bare metal and added a latency checker that picks the fastest server on boot.

October was busy elsewhere, too

These were not the only changes this month. The 2026.10 release, published October 7, shows a platform investing in exactly the polish that a built-in Marketplace will need. The maps got a full rebuild: after the previous map provider started stamping an API key required message across images and broke every map at once, the team switched to vector tiles served by the OpenStreetMap Foundation, which stay sharp at every zoom level and survive short internet hiccups.

Trigger IDs, one of the most powerful automation features, finally got a proper interface instead of a hidden menu. Add a new panel for Modbus connections, one-click connection for external AI assistants, a tidier profile page, and 15 new integrations. Zoom out and the pattern is consistent: fewer rough edges, friendlier defaults, and a platform that is quietly preparing for a much larger mainstream audience.

What it means for your homelab

If you self-host Home Assistant, the practical advice is simple. You do not need to do anything about the Link rename until December, and even then it is cosmetic. For Marketplace, the migration is automatic, but it is worth checking the migration docs when 2026.11 lands, especially if you rely on custom repositories or have replaced built-in integrations with community forks.

The deeper question is whether a built-in store changes the community's character. The honest answer is that it mostly changes discoverability, not governance. Community integrations were always unvetted code from the internet that you ran in your house. Marketplace just makes that fact official, with warnings attached. For a platform whose pitch is local control and privacy, that honesty is on-brand. The alternative, a walled garden of approved integrations, would have been the real betrayal.

And that is the lens to read both announcements through. Home Assistant is not becoming a cloud company; it is renaming the thing that sounded like one. It is not taking over community projects; it is giving them a front door. In a market where devices keep becoming paperweights when a vendor's servers go dark, the quietest statement Home Assistant can make is the loudest one: your house still works when the internet does not.